Manmohan Singh's heart beats for the poor

JYOTI MALHOTRA
May, 2007

Three years on, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh took a call on his economic reform policies last week at the CII conclave, and found them wanting. He wants to now shed his free marketeer skin and show off the heart that beats inside for the nation’s poor, dispossessed and underprivileged classes.

At the CII conclave, the good doctor gave notice about his new job description. For the remaining two years until the elections, the human face of the UPA would be its preferred profile to the nation.

Just like `Kaa’ the friendly snake in the film version of Jim Corbett’s `Jungle Book,’ when Manmohan Singh henceforth sings, ``trust in me…’’, it’s more than likely that both the top honchos of India Inc. as well as those made poorer by the economic reform, will instead run a mile for cover.

Many have said that the PM’s speech at CII constitutes a turning point for Congress politics. That may or may not be true. It seems to me though that it is a turn for the worse for Manmohan Singh.

For someone who’s been synonymous with the reform process since he started it some 15 years ago, Manmohan Singh has been singularly unable to put an institutional safety net in place for workers. One of the reasons the economic reform has got badly stuck is because at the bottom of the pile, which grows larger and larger everyday, there are absolutely no support systems in place when people lose their jobs.

It is this complete disrespect for the price of life that angers people. No health insurance that takes me beyond my job when I lose it, no quality education for my children that is also reasonably inexpensive. We applaud when India’s foreign exchange reserves balloon every month, but what good does that do to me?

The problem with the CII speech is not that industry honchos should not control both graft and greed, thereby keeping a simmering workforce from boiling over. Or that the message of the hour was to share profits with the less privileged and able. The merits of extolling corporate social responsibility by none other than the PM is all very well. Question is, why hasn’t he been able to enforce it even in private industry?

If the PM’s heart was really in the right place, and if the Left parties did not pay mostly lip service to workers rights, the UPA government, while attempting a mid-course correction, would institute changes that would be sweeping and fundamental in nature.

Instead, the PM gets laudatory press for telling the corporate sector to control conspicuous consumption. Fine, but how about telling the corporate sector that if you don’t spend some of the large sums of money that you have earned off the backs of the people, on the people themselves, you might have to pay for it?

How about instituting a national safety net for the workforce, a progressive piece of legislation that is not only crocodile eyewash?
Problem with this Congress government is that it has always been half-hearted about what it wants to do. When, a couple of years ago, Arjun Singh’s Education department decided to that education, a fundamental right, must be fully implemented, it found a novel way of doing so : All children should go to school, Singh announced, only they would not be forced to do so.